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National Geographic : 1961 Apr
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Unbelievable! Bat catches a moth in his wingtip and folds it in, all while in flight. W HETHER the horseshoe bat above (Rhinolophus ferrum-equinum) mis judged his approach or preferred the use of wing instead of tail to catch his meal remains a question. The Lincoln project has but this one extraordinary picture of his feeding tech nique. Only Myotis lucifugus, the little brown bat, has been extensively studied with high speed photography. This double-exposure picture was made with multiple flash. In the first exposure, a wing covered the white line, which 574 isa marker on the background. The whole line shows in the next exposure, taken a fifth of a second later, when the bat had moved to the right and had the moth in his jaws. Tissue thin sails between each wing's elongated fin gers are controlled as if by a hand. Stubby thumbs jut from the wings' forward edges. Science's first hint that sound guides bats came from Lazaro Spallanzani and Louis Jurine, 18th-century European experiment ers, who learned that blinded bats performed normally but deafened ones could not find
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